Socialist responses to capitalism’s first world war still resonate

One hundred years ago, fighting broke out among the great powers of Europe, launching what has become known as World War I. The brutal conflict, which lasted more than four years, proved to be a decisive turning point for humanity and the socialist movement — its effects still felt strongly today.

The run-up to war began on June 28, 1914, when Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist. Four weeks later, Austria-Hungary reacted with an ultimatum to the Serbian government that would have virtually destroyed Serbian independence.

Serbia rejected these demands, and Austria declared war on July 28. Over the next seven days, Europe’s great powers of joined the conflict: Russia, France and Britain on the Serbian side; Germany in alliance with Austria-Hungary on the other. A German invasion brought Belgium into the war.

The initial shock of battle was inconclusive, and the war settled into a murderous and destructive stalemate.

The list of belligerents grew, including Ottoman Turkey on the German side (called the Central Powers), and Italy with the British and French (the “Entente”).

Both sides imposed naval blockades, the Germans using submarines. Both used aviation, newly invented, as a weapon of war. Fighting spread to overseas colonies, with Japan seizing several German possessions in the Far East.

The United States entered the war in 1917, giving the Entente material superiority.

Uprisings

For the people in Europe's warring countries, the conflict brought untold suffering and death. As the war progressed, working people responded with strikes, protests, mutinies and uprisings.

The 1917 revolution in Russia took it out of the war the next year.

Starting in August 1918, the Entente armies began a sustained advance on all fronts. A tide of revolution swept the Central Powers. An uprising of German workers and soldiers brought the war to an abrupt end on November 11, 1918.

An estimated 10 million armed personnel were killed, along with 7 million civilians. Production in the warring countries fell by about a third, condemning millions of workers to destitution.

Nor did the guns fall silent in 1918: armed attacks continued against the Soviet republic; rebellious workers in Germany, Hungary and other countries; and insurgent colonial peoples.

At the war's end, a workers' and peasants' republic had been established in Russia, which broke free from world imperialism. Meanwhile, the victorious powers seized many pieces of land in Europe and the colonies. Several new capitalist states were set up in Eastern Europe.

The victors formed a continuing alliance, the League of Nations, supposedly to keep the peace. But imperialist rivalries continued as before, and within 20 years, Europe and the world were plunged into an even more destructive conflict.

The socialist movement before 1914, which enjoyed mass support across Europe, foresaw the oncoming war and joined efforts to head off the threat.

A conference of the Socialist International in 1907 pledged to “exert every effort to prevent [war's] outbreak”. If war broke out, socialists would “intervene for its speedy termination” and “strive with all their power to utilise the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule”.

The quoted passage was proposed by Rosa Luxemburg, a leader of the International's left wing. Although cautiously worded, it contained an unmistakable commitment to respond to war by efforts toward a workers' revolution.

The pledge was repeated by the International's congresses in 1910 and 1912. Many strong anti-war actions took place, including in 1914.

Commitments betrayed

When war arrived in August 1914, the rulers in each country used their control of newspapers and dominant social institutions to impose their interpretation of the war as purely an act of self-defence. Some in the socialist ranks were influenced by this barrage.

Socialist movements faced a threat: resistance to the war would drive them into illegality, sacrificing their impressive administrative and publishing apparatus, and subjecting them to severe repression.

Socialist leaders in Britain, France, Belgium and Germany crumpled before this prospect. On August 4, 1914, the parliamentary representatives of the International's strongest component, the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD), voted unanimously to finance the German war effort, a blatant repudiation of socialist principle.

British, French and Belgian leaders did likewise, and the Socialist International collapsed. Only in Russia and Serbia did socialists stand by their pledge to oppose the war.

Lenin, the central leader of the Bolshevik wing of Russian socialists, was then living across the border in Austria-Hungary.

The local authorities arrested him on August 8. Austrian socialists secured his release, and he made his way to neutral Switzerland, arriving in Bern on September 5.

During the next three days, he met with other Bolshevik leaders. They adopted the first major statement on the war by its socialist opponents.

The war was “bourgeois, imperialist and dynastic” in character, the Bolsheviks said.

They added: “A struggle for markets and for freedom to loot foreign countries, a striving to suppress the revolutionary movement of the proletariat and democracy in the individual countries, a desire to deceive, disunite, and slaughter the proletarians of all countries by setting the wage slaves of one nation against those of another so as to benefit the bourgeoisie — these are the only real content and significance of the war.”

The Bolsheviks declared that support for war by major socialist parties signified “the ideological and political bankruptcy of the [Socialist] International”. Neither of the warring blocs was in any way superior to the other, they said.

Soldiers and workers needed to “use weapons, not against their brothers, the wage slaves in other countries, but against the reactionary and bourgeois governments of all countries”. They stood for “a revolution in Russia” and “liberation of and self-determination for nationalities oppressed by Russia”.

The statement faithfully applied the International's pre-war stand and accurately predicted the course actually taken by the 1917 revolution.

Anti-war voices

During the next six months, the revolutionary wing of German socialists raised their banner, setting in motion the organisation of anti-war socialists internationally.

In early August 1914, a few left-wing opponents of the war met in Rosa Luxemburg's apartment and decided to send 300 telegrams to left-wing party officials, inviting them to discuss a collective response to the August 4 betrayal.

Only one clearly positive answer was received, from Clara Zetkin.

However, opposition stirred in some local SPD groups. For example, a meeting of SPD leaders in Stuttgart, where Zetkin was based, condemned the war credits vote by 81 to three.

On September 21, Karl Liebknecht, a parliamentary deputy and pre-war leader of the SPD's anti-war campaign, met in Stuttgart with a group of prominent party leaders there.

They berated him for his failure to break party discipline and vote against war spending. “You are quite right in criticising me,” Liebknecht responded. “Even if alone, I should have called out my 'no'.”

In November, Luxemburg's local party branch sent out a message calling for underground work and a new party.

On December 2, the SPD’s anti-war minority broke through the censorship with a dramatic action. Liebknecht voted in parliament against war spending, “in protest against the war; against those who launched it and those who direct it; against the capitalist policies that brought it about; against the capitalist objectives for which it is waged ...”

Liebknecht's stand resounded across Europe.

On March 26–28, 1915, Zetkin convened the first wartime international socialist conference in Bern: a conference of the Socialist Women's Movement with 29 delegates from seven countries.

“Only the united determination of the people can stop the slaughter,” the conference declared. “Down with capitalism ... Down with the war! Onward to socialism!”

The next month, delegates representing socialist youth leagues in nine countries, with tens of thousands of members, held a similar conference in Bern.

Zimmerwald

In September 1915, 42 delegates from 11 countries gathered in Zimmerwald, Switzerland. A left wing in the conference, led by the Bolsheviks, stressed the need for a clean break with pro-war socialists and a struggle to overthrow capitalism; other forces emphasised the need to struggle for peace.

All currents at the conference, however, united in calling on workers to fight for peace, without annexations or indemnities. The conference said the struggle for peace was also a struggle for freedom, reconciliation of peoples and socialism.

The Zimmerwald manifesto, drafted mostly by Leon Trotsky, circulated illegally in the warring countries and became a banner for revolutionary workers.

The war lasted for three more horrific years. By its end, the slogans of Zimmerwald were being voiced by millions of workers and soldiers across Europe. In 1917 and 1918, they carried out revolutions in Russia, Germany, and several neighbouring countries.

The manisto, in part, read: "The manifesto reads, in part: "The war has lasted more than a year. Millions of corpses cover the battlefields ...

"The most savage barbarism is today celebrating its triumph over all that hitherto constituted the price of humanity ...

"[T]he war that has produced this chaos is the product of imperialism, of the attempt on the part of the capitalist classes of every nation to feed their greed for profit by the exploitation of human labor and of the natural resources of the entire globe ...

"[We] call upon the working class to come to its senses and to fight for peace. This struggle is the struggle for freedom, for the reconciliation of peoples, for socialism ...

"Proletarians! ... [Y]ou must stand up for your own cause, for the sacred aims of socialism, for the emancipation of the oppressed nations as well as of the enslaved classes ... No sacrifice is too great, no burden too heavy in order to achieve this goal: peace among the peoples ...

"Beyond all borders, beyond the reeking battlefields, beyond the devastated cities and villages: Proletarians of all countries, unite."

A century after World War I, the spirit of Zimmerwald still resounds in our global struggle against war and oppression.

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